DIY

My daughter Zoe now has a cork floor in her bedroom. It's called a floating floor, hopefully not because it'll get so wet with global warming that we'll need it as a raft. This is the second floor we've installed in our new to us house, and it went pretty well.

Things I learned.

Builders who put in angles other than 90 degrees are evil. If the odd angle has a doorway in it, and if the angle continues into a closet, they really, really, really hate the person who will be doing the finishing work. Did you know that a mitre box is great for 45 degree cuts, but no others?

If you could commit a sin strongly enough to go to hell, I'd be there. I had severe tool envy while installing quarter round. I really wanted a sliding compound mitre saw and an air powered nail gun. I had a mitre box, a hand saw, 2 hammers and a box of 2" finishing nails.

Quarter round is not corner round. I always thought it was called corner round. Not as funny a mishearing as the girl with colitis walks by, but still wrong. As it's 1/4 of a round stick, the name shouldn't surprise me. But it goes in the corner where the wall meets the floor, so either name fits.

2" nails are WAY too long for 11/16 inch quarter round. Unless you are looking for a real workout with a hammer.

Spackle in a tube is still one of my favourite things. Spackle. Spackle spackle spackle. Still love that word. Maybe one day I will grow up and not giggle every time I hear it. I hope not.

There are more than 4 wrong ways to cut a 45 degree angle, but only one right one.

A mistake doesn't use up much quarter round. The offcuts are amusingly curvy, and surprisingly plentiful.

Despite a total lack of experience installing trim, I can do a good job.

I should take pictures. Right now the cork floor - so beautifully installed people think it's a sheet and not planks - is underneath teen daughter's new furniture and mounds of clothing. Ah well.

I still need to install the reducer strip. If you leave a rough edge of flooring, you need to fix it before installing said strip. I spent over an hour today with a hammer and chisel, evening out the edge. Clearly there is a market for extra wide reducer strips. Unless I am the only person who measures, makes a paper mold of the odd cuts (thanks, oh creative builder, for your not quite perfect 135 degree angles), marks the piece, then adds a half inch or so at the door end. It is lovely and straight now, ready to install the perfectly cut piece of transition strip that will stop the ugly blue carpet from leaving bits all over the house. I think I will screw it in, so it's easy to remove when the carpet goes. The underpad was disintegrating, although I've removed worse.

Next job? Not sure. My credit card is keen for a break. The floor plus new furniture plus Christmas kind of caused it pain, even though most was paid off with the last bill. But boy, is the remaining blue carpet ever ugly...

Post Christmas installation blues

It used to be batteries - you never had enough for all the things you bought, no matter how carefully you checked the packaging. There would always be a remote or something that needed still more batteries. Even if you only bought teddy bears, they needed batteries. Or something.

Now it's more complicated, but there are fewer tears. We spent about 45 minutes setting up the new router - dual band, or something, so when we watch YouTube videos we don't get the spinning thing while the video decides if it should progress past the 1:03 mark. I can now spend more time watching the Muppets and Monty Python sketches.

We also set up the wireless wheel. Which has a mess of wires - only wireless if you add 65 batteries or so. See paragraph 1 above. Child #3 is loving the steering wheel game, and has bought and crashed one corvette. May his real life driving prove more cautious.

Then we attacked the PVR. The instructions lie. You have to call Rogers and convince them that you are a legitimate customer. Then they try to sell you stuff you already have. Then read out serial numbers, several times. It's been a few hours, but mostly that's because my husband - who bought the PVR - was over at his dad's chipping ice off his Cadillac for the last 2 hours. Ah, holiday ice storms. If the sun comes out, it will be spectacular.

All told, we had a very nice Christmas. The kids are happy with their gifts and seem to think we got them more than enough loot. We went sledding on Christmas day, and it was fun. The driving was fine, as the freezing rain didn't start till we were back. I got booze and chocolate, in quantity, so expect to see me in the New Year as a fat alcoholic.

Ritual without religion

I am a fan of blogs. Mostly science & skeptical blogs, and one that is more philosophical and political - Greta Christina's blog. Her writing is as exceptional as her thinking.

My writing is as muddy as mine, so thanks for your patience in slogging through ye olde silly blog.

But she had a thought that made me think, which is better than just thoughts I agree with. Thinking is fun. Honest. I just don't do enough of it.

She mentioned that she thought some people might be tied to the rituals, not the beliefs, of their faith, and that it was possible to be a secular Jew or Catholic.

I agree that you can be a secular Jew. By my definition, of course, which means someone who sees their Judaism as a cultural and not merely religious heritage.

Catholic I had more trouble with. Maybe because I can't see something I used to be associated with as particularly meaningful. I mean, they spend years going on about how much communion rocks, then you finally get your first communion, and it's a gummy wafer. It's tasteless, it adheres to the roof of your mouth (or retainer, if you forget to take it out), and it better not be the body of christ cause he's been dead, for, like, 2000 years, eh, so it'd, be, like, gross.

OK, so clearly by ritual she means more than ritualistic pseudo cannibalism, my favourite phrase for communion. And with Judaism the holy bits are associated with a history of persecution. Insane persecution. I mean, it's amazing anyone lasted as a Jew.

I just don't see that same history with Catholicism. Yeah, a few early Christians made excellent lion food. But it's not like the Romans were nice to everyone else, and Constantine made it the norm once he converted, I think in AD 333. Or so. And how much systematic repression against Catholics has there been since? Some, sure, the Irish would have a few stories, and certainly it was an issue for JFK. But in Canada? Not so much.

I realize a ritual is not simply meaningful cause your relatives got killed for it. Meaning I have yet to form a coherent thought. One may yet arrive, don't hold your breath.

Dropping the religious bits of Catholicism leaves guilt. Ask any former Catholic. Not much else. Christmas? The tree and gifts were adopted from the pagans. Easter? What? Did Jesus hide chocolate eggs as he staggered towards his execution carrying a cross? Maybe they left that bit out. I don't know where the chocolate egg hiding or bunny delivering them comes from, but it ain't Catholicism. What else? White dresses? Odd hats? Men wearing red dresses? The chants of a mass that come back verbatim at every funeral I sit through? I don't find it comforting, though - I find it depersonalizes the funeral.

So I don't think that there's any meaningful ritual that ties a former Catholic to Catholicism similar to those that would create a secular Jew. Am I wrong? For some people, absolutely. For me, not so much.

Really crappy weight loss plan

1. Catch H1N1. Make sure your virus comes with nausea.

2. Spend 36 hours in bed, eating 2 small bowls of plain white rice. It helps with drinking fluids.

3. Stagger out of bed, eat another small bowl of rice. Enjoy feeling of being upright and not in pain.

4. Discover that you can tolerate small amounts of chili mixed in the rice. Mmmm. Flavour. You can eat almost 1/3 of a cup of this!

5. It's now day 3, and you can branch out. Go wild. Try a half bowl of muesli. It'll only take 25 minutes or so to eat. For lunch, revert back to chili and rice. Dinner? Almost an entire half asparagus omelette!

6. Day 4. The children have caught the illness. Eat a slightly less small bowl of cereal, and for lunch, almost the rest of the omelette. Dinner is great, but by now your stomach feels like you've undergone gastric bypass surgery and only holds half a bowl.

Congratulations! You've now lost 5 pounds! If you can ignore the near-constant hacking cough and your feverish children, or if you maybe wanted to lose weight, this would be a good thing.

Swine flu sucks. Get the vaccine. Once it's available...

Make it go away

Swine flu news is everywhere. Or rather, 2009 H1N1(A) news.

I like reading the news, although I tend to skip stories about kids dying. I'm a parent, I don't want to imagine the heartache of losing a kid. But this flu, although mostly normal, seems to randomly kill the occasional kid. Healthy kids, too.

I'm not keen on thinking that my kids are in that demographic most likely to get a nasty case of H1N1, even though the odds are quite high that, should they get it, they'll be fine. So what can I do?

D'uh. I can get them vaccinated. Eventually - for now, lineups are brutal and only specific groups should be seeking vaccines. Happily our health department is on Twitter and is updating wait times regularly, so we can wait until it won't be a wait.

In the interim, I can hope that my daughter's current flu-like illness will, like most such illnesses, pass quickly and relatively painlessly.

Vaccinations. One of those things we should be incredibly grateful for, but aren't. I am personally extremely happy my children are highly unlikely to get whooping cough, diptheria, or mumps, let alone polio, and that the eradication of smallpox eliminates the need for that vaccination. Childhood used to be damn risky. Not so much anymore, so we freak out over risks that are miniscule in comparison with what our grandparents dealt with.

Thank you to all the scientists who have and continue to make childhood safer and healthier. You get a lot of flack from wingnuts who blame vaccines for virtually every bad thing that's happened in the last decade or so, all undeserved.

Gobble gobble

I have just eaten an enormous quantity of food, accompanied by wine.

I have also just lost the button on my pants.

You might think they exploded. Assploded? No. This is not the case. They fit OK. A bit large, actually, but I am one of those many not quite a size 8 but a 6 doesn't work after turkey girls.

The button came off as I tried to remove it. This sounds like a classic cake of overturkeyitis, but I'd like to state for the record that it was a classic case of impatience. As in, holy crap, I have drunk too much wine and must pee, why do women's pants have two clasps and a button, oh never mind about the button.

So I must resew the button. And finish the wine. I am in mourning, so it's allowed. My bicycle suffered a traumatic injury. I approached it after work, with the uncharitable thought of gee, hope that isn't mine. It was. A back tire so flat, Arnold's abs are a keg in comparison. I now have 3 flat tires to fix this weekend - one on beater bike, 2 on awesome bike. So I had to trade in $5 for $3 in coins so I could take the crappy bus home, through horrific traffic. I am now paying for a bus pass I don't use, and a bus ride I loathed. Tomorrow is Friday payday long weekend. I suspect I will be a wee mite teed at myself for finishing off the red wine. But for now, I am enjoying it.

Goals for weekend. Fix bikes. Ride like maniac in amazing fall weather, with fabulous leaf colours, just like this morning - which was so beautiful it shouldn't be legal. Watch lunar crash. Realize again the universe is awesome, as is earth, and free of gods. Hug kids.

Back to school sucks

Sorry, Staples. You have it all wrong. It is not the most wonderful time of the year.

Back to school season means I need to find my chequebook. Online banking doesn't work for pizza days, school fees, music books or field trips.

Back to school means new and exciting viruses to infect us. I am one of those really annoying people that rarely gets sick. My spouse gets everything. He's on his 3rd illness. Teen daughter is on her first. The boys had one each. It seems each child had a separate disease they shared only with their father. This kind of generosity he can live without.

I've already gone on at length about school lunches. The children don't eat yoghurt. They infrequently eat chicken. Fruit should be selected for longevity, as it travels back and forth frequently. I send it anyways - maybe one day they will be famished enough to actually eat it.

There are positives. I'm sure there are positives. It's nice seeing my daughter in the morning, even though she's a wee mite grumpy. I can't blame her - she likes to sleep to noon, and is up at 7. The kids spend lots of time with their friends. Sometimes at the friends' houses, which makes ours quieter. The boys spend less time on their vidiot games.

The biggest drawback is homework. I really hate homework. And no, I do not do my kids' homework. I just have to irritate the crap out of them to get them to admit to having any, then nag until my brain hurts to get them to start. This takes 90 minutes. The homework takes 10. If they remember it - we've had our first call from a teacher requesting an interview.

It's been 4 weeks. 3 illnesses. 1 meet the teacher night. 1 request for interviews. Many, many lunches, several used more than once. You'd think after a decade of this I could manage it, and I can, it's just not the most wonderful time of the year. That's at the end of June, only 9 months away!